AKARI (formerly ASTRO-F) is an infrared sky survey mission from
Institute of Space and Astronautical Science (ISAS) of the Japan
Aerospace eXploration Agency (JAXA) with the participation of the European
Space Agency (ESA).

The Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) will be installed in
the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) during a Space Shuttle mission
scheduled in 2000. ACS will increase the discovery efficiency of
the HST by a factor of ten. ACS will consist
of three electronic cameras and a complement of filters and
dispersers that detect light from the ultraviolet at 1200 angstroms
to the near infrared at 10,000 angstroms.

AST/RO is a 1.7 meter diameter off-axis telescope for research
in astronomy and aeronomy at wavelengths between 200 microns and
2 mm. The instrument is now operating at the South
Pole with four heterodyne receivers and three acousto-optical spectrometers.

APO is privately owned and operated by the Astrophysical Research
Consortium. Located near Sunspot, New Mexico, the observatory consists of
a 3.5-meter telescope, the 2.5-meter Sloan Digital Sky Survey telescope,
and two smaller telescopes.

The Astronomical Data Center (ADC), at NASA Goddard Space Flight
Center, Greenbelt, Maryland, is a cooperative effort between the National
Space Science Data Center (NSSDC)/ World Data Center A for
Rockets and Satellites (WDC-A-R&S) and its parent organization, the Space
Science Data Operations Office . Currently, the ADC archives hold
more than 670 catalogs of astrometry, photometry, spectroscopy, radio, and
other miscellaneous data for stellar and nonstellar objects. The data
were acquired through exchanges with the Centre de Donn'ees Astronomiques
de Strasbourg (CDS) , other astronomical data centers throughout the
world, and by direct contributions from the international astronomical community.

Astrophysical CATalogs Support System (CATS) of the Special Astrophysical observatory
includes a large number of astrophysical catalogs (mostly radioastronomical) and
allows users to select sources from the CATS by different
parameters, to make cross-identifications with user's lists and to study
radio spectra of radio sources.

The atomic line list is a compilation of approximately 855,000
allowed, intercombination and forbidden atomic transitions with wavelengths in the
range from 0.5 Å to 1000 µm. Its primary intention
is to allow the identification of observed atomic absorption or
emission features. The list is nearly complete for all ionization
stages of all elements up to zinc. Transition probabilities are
available for nearly 14% of the lines; they are mostly
derived from Opacity Project data.

CFHT is a joint facility of the National Research Council
of Canada, the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique of
France, and the University of Hawaii. The CFH observatory hosts
a world-class, 3.6 meter optical/infrared telescope. The observatory is located
atop the summit of Mauna Kea, a 4200 meter, dormant
volcano located on the island of Hawaii. The CFH Telescope
became operational in 1979. There is a Mirror
copy of the Web site at CDS. A CFHT page at CADC has information about the
CFHT archive, CCDs, proposal template and manuals.

The Catalog of Infrared Observations is a database of over
200,000 published infrared observations of more than 10,000 individual astronomical
sources over the wavelength range from 1 to 1000 microns.
The catalog is available for downloading via ftp.

CHARA research is focused on the development of astronomical long-baseline
optical/infrared interferometry and the application of interferometry to high resolution
observations leading to the determination of the astrophysical properties of
stars. The Center operates the CHARA Array, a six-telescope optical/infrared
interferometric array in a Y-shaped array contained within a 400m
diameter circle (on Mount Wilson, California). This configuration will provide
high resolution interferometry in the visible spectral region as well
as the K spectral band (2.2 micron), with a limiting
resolution of 0.2 milliarcsec in the visible.

The NAOC-Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) were officially founded on
April 25, 2001 through the bringing together of four CAS
observatories, three CAS observing stations and one CAS research centre.
The Headquarters of the NAOC are situated in the northern
suburbs of Beijing on the site of the former Beijing
Astronomical Observatory (BAO), and take responsibility for all matters relating
to the former BAO. [also in Chinese]

DENIS is a deep complete survey of the astronomical sources
of the Southern Sky in 2 near-infrared bands (J at
1.25 micron & K at 2.16 micron) and one optical
band (I at 0.8 micron) simultaneously, using a one meter
ground-based telescope at La Silla (Chile), with limiting magnitudes 18.5,
16.5 and 14.0, respectively.

DENIS is a deep astronomical survey of the Southern Sky
in two near-infrared bands (J at 1.25 µ and K
at 2.16 µ) and one optical band (I at 0.8
µ) simultaneously, conducted by a European consortium, using a one
meter telescope (ESO, La Silla). The survey started in 1996
and is expected to be completed in 2000. The Centre
de Données Astronomiques de Strasbourg (CDS) is implementing the final
point source databases and is providing access of the processed
and calibrated data to the worldwide community.

DU Astronomy research and Observatories, among which: Mt.Evans Meyer-Womble Observatory
located at 14,124 feet above sea level, on Mt.Evans in
the Front Range of Colorado, used for infrared astronomy research.

This site offers information about the extensive activities of the
Royal Observatory, Edinburgh, a PPARC establishment responsible for building common-user
IR and sub-mm instrumentation and managing telescope sites and data
archive resources, as well as the UK Schmidt Telescope and
the SuperCOSMOS measuring machine. The ROE site also has links
to, or acts as the home page for:

The Complejo Astronómico El Leoncito is an astronomical facility operated
under agreement between the Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y
Técnicas de la República Argentina and the Universities of La
Plata, Córdoba and San Juan. Its main telescope is a
2.15 meter reflector, equipped with direct CCD camera, spectrographs, a
photopolarimeter and other instruments. It is located at 2552 meters
above the sea level, in a high quality astronomical site
in the mountains of Calingasta, 240 km away from the
city of San Juan (Argentina). The use of this facility
is open to the national and international astronomical community. [also
in Spanish]

The Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) and its Observatories
(the Observatorio de Teide, on Tenerife, and the Observatorio del
Roque de los Muchachos, on La Palma) make up a
Spanish research and observational centre, which, since 1979, has been
open to the international scientific community and effectively constitute the
European Northern Observatory (ENO). [also in Spanish]

NASA's plan for the Exploration of Neighboring Planetary Systems (ExNPS)
consists of a long term program of continuous scientific discovery
and technological development leading ultimately to the detection and characterization
of Earth-like planets around nearby stars.

The two FORS instruments are designed as all-dioptric focal reducers
for the ESO Very Large Telescope. They are capable of
doing : direct imaging , long slit grism spectroscopy ,
multi object grism spectroscopy , polarimetry (FORS1), medium dispersion echelle
grism spectroscopy (FORS2), and all sensible combinations of these modes
(e.g. imaging- or spectropolarimetry) in the wavelength range from 330nm
to 1100nm.

The Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory (FLWO) is the largest field
installation of the Smithsonian Institution Astrophysical Observatory (SAO) outside Cambridge,
MA (USA). Located near Amado, Arizona on Mount Hopkins, the
FLWO has the following facilities: * The 6.5-meter MMT (256-inch) ,
a joint facility operated with the University of Arizona, for
solar system, galactic and extragalactic astronomy. * The 1.5-meter (60-inch) and
1.2-meter (48-inch) reflector telescopes, for solar system, galactic and extragalactic
astronomy. * The 1.3-meter(51-inch) PAIRITEL (Peters Automated IR Imaging Telescope, ex-2MASS)
reflector, for infrared observations, especially of gamma-ray bursts, supernovae and
other variable sources. * The 10-meter optical Gamma-ray reflector telescope. Also
visit VERITAS. * The IOTA Telescopes, used for optical and infrared
interferometry (in collaboration with several institutions). * The HAT (Hungarian Automated
Telescope) network of optical refractor telescopes, used for robotic observations
of the night sky.

The U.K. GEMINI Support Group based at Oxford University, England
is aimed at supporting the U.K. astronomer community in the
use of the GEMINI 8m Telescopes. This site is the
main source of information on the telescopes themselves, their instrument
compliment, applying for observing time, observing with the GEMINI telecopes
and post-observing data reduction/analysis for U.K. researchers.

There will be one GMOS for each of the two
GEMINI 8-m telescopes ( UK mirror ) which are due
for completion in 1998 and 2000. They will provide a
versatile low/medium resolution spectroscopic capability which will exploit the excellent
image quality delivered by the telescopes at optical and near-infrared
wavelengths.

The Gemini Observatory consists of twin 8-meter optical/infrared telescopes located
on two of the best sites on our planet for
observing the universe. Together these telescopes can access the entire
sky. The Gemini South telescope is located at almost 9,000’
elevation on a mountain in the Chilean Andes called Cerro
Pachón. Cerro Pachón shares resources with the adjacent SOAR Telescope
and the nearby telescopes of the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory.
The Gemini North Telescope is located on Hawaii’s Mauna Kea
as part of the international community of observatories that have
been built to take advantage of the superb atmospheric conditions
on this long dormant volcano that rises almost 14,000' into
the dry, stable air of the Pacific. The Gemini Observatory’s
international headquarters is located in Hilo, Hawaii at the University
of Hawaii at Hilo’s University Park.

The Deutsches Interferometer fuer Vielkanalphotometrie und Astrometrie (DIVA) is a
small astronomy satellite, planned for launch in 2004. It is
aimed to measure positions, proper motions and parallaxes, brightness and
color of at least 30 million stars. This amount
and the high precision is unreached so far by any
predecessor mission. In a sense it is a pathfinder mission
for the technology of upcoming cornerstone missions in the ESA
Horizon 2000+ and the NASA Origins programmes like GAIA, DARWIN,
LISA, SIM etc.

The Telescopio InfraRosso del GOrnergrat ( TIRGO ) is located
on the northern tower of the Kulm Hotel at Gornergrat
(3135 m altitude) near Zermatt . It is a 1.5m
Cassegrain telescope with a wobbling secondary and optimized for infrared
observations. The telescope and related instrumentation is run by
the Istituto di Radioastronomia (IRA - C.N.R. ), sezione di
Firenze (former CAISMI) , with the assistance of the Osservatorio
Astrofisico di Arcetri and the Dipartimento di Astronomia e Scienza
dello Spazio of the Universita' di Firenze.

The Gran Telescopio CANARIAS (GTC), is a high performance segmented
10-meter telescope to be installed in one of the best
sites of the Northern Hemisphere: the Roque de los Muchachos
Observatory (La Palma, Canary Islands, Spain). First light is planed
for 2002. The GTC project is a Spanish initiative,
led by the IAC (Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias)
with the aim of becoming an international project. GRANTECAN
has undertaken the construction of this telescope. [also in Spanish]

The Hubble Space Telescope is a cooperative program of the
European Space Agency (ESA) and the National Aeronautics and Space
Administration (NASA) to operate a long-lived space-based observatory for the
benefit of the international astronomical community. To accomplish this goal
and protect the spacecraft against instrument and equipment failures, NASA
had always planned on regular servicing missions. Hubble has special
grapple fixtures, 76 handholds, and stabilized in all three axes.
HST is a 2.4-meter reflecting telescope which was deployed in
low-Earth orbit (600 kilometers) by the crew of the space
shuttle Discovery (STS-31) on 25 April 1990. HST's current complement
of science instruments include three cameras, two spectrographs, and fine
guidance sensors (primarily used for astrometric observations). Because of HST's
location above the Earth's atmosphere, these science instruments can produce
high resolution images of astronomical objects. Ground-based telescopes can seldom
provide resolution better than 1.0 arc-seconds, except momentarily under the
very best observing conditions. HST's resolution is about 10 times
better, or 0.1 arc-seconds.

The main IRAF distribution includes a good selection of programs
for general image processing and graphics, plus a large number
of programs for the reduction and analysis of optical and
IR astronomy data (the "NOAO" packages). Other external or layered
packages are available for applications such as data acquisition or
handling data from other observatories and wavelength regimes such as
the Hubble Space Telescope (optical), EUVE (extreme ultra-violet), or ROSAT
and AXAF (X-ray). These external packages are distributed separately from
the main IRAF distribution but can be easily installed. The
IRAF system also includes a complete programming environment for scientific
applications, which includes a programmable Command Language scripting facility, the
IMFORT Fortran/C programming interface, and the full SPP/VOS programming environment
in which the portable IRAF system and all applications are
written.

The Indian Astronomical Observatory, the high-altitude station of IIA is
situated at an altitude of 4500 metres above mean sea
level to the north of Western Himalayas. Atop Mt. Saraswati
in the vast Nilamkhul Plain in the Hanle Valley of
Changthang, Ladakh (4250m above msl), the site is a dry,
cold desert with sparse human population and the ancient Hanle
monastery as its nearest neighbour. The cloudless skies and low
atmospheric water vapour make it one of the best sites
in the world for optical, infrared, sub-millimetre, and millimetre wavelengths.
A 2-m optical infrared telescope is installed at the observatory.
This telescope is remotely operated from CREST, Hosakote, using dedicated
satellite links. In addition, IIA is collaborating with University of
Washington, St. Louis, in operating a 0.5-m photometry telescope for
continuous monitoring of Active Galactic Nuclei. This telescope will be
one of the pair of telescopes constituting Antipodal Transient Observatory.
A 0.3-m Differential Image Motion Monitor, a 220-GHz radiometer and
an Automated Weather Station have been installed to facilitate continuation
of site characterisation.

The `InfraRed Space Interferometry Mission' DARWIN (IRSI or DARWIN) is
a cornerstone mission in the ESA `Horizon 2000+' science plan.
The goals for this space mission is for the
first time to detect terrestial planets in orbit around other
stars than our Sun.

The IRTF is a 3.0 meter telescope optimized for use
in the infrared. It was first built to support the
Voyager missions to Jupiter. It is now the USA National
facility for infrared astronomy providing continued support to planetary and
deep space applications.

The NASA/IPAC InfraRed Science Archive (IRSA) is a project focused
on providing software and Internet services to facilitate astronomical discoveries,
support the production of new astronomical data products, and to
plan future observations utilizing the data archives from infrared astrophysics
missions supported at IPAC.

The Infrared Astronomical Satellite surveyed almost the entire sky in
four infrared bands and obtained deeper maps and low-resolution spectra
of thousands of infrared sources. All of the IRAS data
products released by IPAC, including catalogs and images, are
accessible through this interface, provided by the Astrophysics Data
Facility at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. The interface also
includes links to many related Astronomical Data Center catalogs.

The Infrared Processing and Analysis Center (IPAC) exists to carry
out large, data-intensive processing tasks of critical importance to NASA's
infrared astronomy program, and to provide scientific expertise on those
projects to the astronomical community. IPAC is operated by the
California Institute of Technology, Jet Propulsion Laboratory under contract to
the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).

The Infrared Space Observatory (ISO) has been an ESA (European
Space Agency) mission with the participation of ISAS (Japan) and
NASA (USA). This WWW server is maintained at the ISO
Data Centre, which is based at Villafranca, Madrid, and is
part of the Astrophysics Division of the Space Science Department.

The Interferometry Center of Excellence (ICE), at JPL, has been
established to ensure the development and maintenance of a leading
edge capability in optical and near-infrared interferometric astrometry and imaging.

This URL takes you to a WWW page where you
can subscribe to a number of listservs devoted to the
Next Generation Space Telescope project. You may subscribe to any
of them. Posting is restricted. Right now, these are used
as ways to inform the community about progress in the
project. The web site contains links for feedback to the
project team members.

The 15-m JCMT is situated close to the summit of
Mauna Kea, Hawaii, and is the largest submillmetre facility in
the world. It is owned and operated by the UK,
Canada and the Netherlands on behalf of astronomers worldwide. Its
home page contains information about the site, the antenna and
the instrumentation, as well as a description of the JCMT-CSO
interferometer, and details of the various time allocation processes.

The JWST is a critical component of NASA's Origins Program.
It will be a telescope of aperture greater than 4m,
radiatively cooled to 30 - 60 deg.K, permitting extremely deep
exposures at near infrared wavelengths with a 10 year life.
A key requirement is to break the HST cost paradigm
through the use of new technology and management methods. This
site is designed to serve as the starting point for
finding online NGST Study documentation. There is also a
public home page at NASA, and a European
site at ST-ECF.

The Large Binocular Telescope (LBT) is a collaboration between Arizona
(25%), Italy (25%, represented by the Arcetri Astrophysical Observatory in
Florence), Research Corporation (12.5%), the Ohio State University (12.5%), and
Germany (25%, represented by the LBT Beteiligungsgesellschaft). The goal
of the LBT project is to construct and exploit a
binocular telescope consisting of two 8.4-meter mirrors on a common
mount. This telescope will be equivalent in light-gathering power to
a single 11.8-meter instrument. Because of its binocular arrangement, the
telescope will have a resolving power (ultimate image sharpness) corresponding
to a 23-meter telescope.

The focus of the Laser Guide Star Adaptive Optics Program
at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) is the development of
integrated adaptive optics (AO) and sodium-layer laser guide star (LGS)
systems for use on large astronomical telescopes.

The General Catalogue of Photometric Data (GCPD) built at the
Institute of Astronomy of the University of Lausanne contains photometric
data for about 200000 stars from some 75 different systems,
taken from about 3300 papers. The WWW server allows to
query the database ad retrieve any data from any photometric
system. Searching the references by authors' names and keywords from
the titles offers a possibility to retrieve the data from
each of the 3300 papers directly.

Details of the research and teaching interests of the group,
as well as information on the Liverpool Telescope project
- a fully-robotic 2m telescope to be situated at the
Observatorio del Roque de los Muchachos, La Palma. As
well as the Astrophysics degree-course with Liverpool University, we also
have an innovative distance learning course.

Created in 1983, LEDA is the oldest Extragalactic Database. It
gives more than 60 of the most important parameters for
about one million galaxies. It provides charts and images through
a Web interface. In addition, a batch mode is available
and also a very powerful SQL-like query language.

The Magdalena Ridge Observatory (MRO) project is an international scientific
collaboration between New Mexico Tech, the University of Cambridge (UK),
New Mexico State University, New Mexico Highlands University, the University
of Puerto Rico, and Los Alamos National Laboratory. The project
is overseen by the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory. The observatory
is primarily intended for astronomical research and will be composed
of two facilities, a single telescope and an array of
optical/infrared telescopes called the Magdalena Ridge Observatory Interferometer (MROI). Located
on the main ridge of the Magdalena mountains, some 30
miles west of the New Mexico Tech campus, at an
elevation of 10,600 ft. above sea level, it will be
the fourth highest observatory in the world.

McDonald Observatory is located 450 miles west of Austin, Texas,
in the Davis Mountains. At present, there are three operating
telescopes: 2.7-meter, 2.1-meter, and .76-meter reflectors. The Observatory is equipped
with a wide range of state-of-the-art instrumentation for imaging and
spectroscopy in the optical and infrared, and it boasts one
of the first and most productive lunar ranging stations.

The MSX observatory is a Ballistic Missile Defense Organization project
which offers major benefits for both the defense and civilian
sectors. It was launched on a Delta II vehicle on
April 24, 1996, into a 900 km, polar, near-Sun synchronous
orbit. The spacecraft featured an advanced multispectral image capability to
gather data on test targets and space background phenomena.
The infrared sensors operated at 11 to 12 degrees Kelvin
by employing a solid hydrogen cryostat. The IR instruments span
the range 4.2 - 26 microns. The focal plane array
consists of five bands and the radiometer beam-size is more
than 25 times smaller than IRAS. As a result, much
greater spatial resolution than anything currently available has been obtained.
The cryogen phase of the mission ended on 26 February
1997. During the ten month cryogen phase of the mission
over 200 Giga Bytes of data on Celestial Backgrounds were
obtained. See the MSX Celestial Backgrounds Team
Home Page for additional details.

The Monterey Institute for Research in Astronomy is a non-profit
astronomical observatory, founded in 1972 and dedicated to research and
education in astronomy. Includes an Atlas of Low-Resolution Near-Infrared Spectra
of Normal Stars.

The Mt. Graham International Observatory is located on Mt. Graham
near Safford , Arizona. Two telescopes are now in operation,
the Vatican Observatory/Arizona 1.8m Lennon telescope (VATT) and the
10m diameter Heinrich Hertz Submillimeter Telescope (SMT), a joint
project of Arizona and the Max-Planck-Institut für Radioastronomie, Germany.

The mountain is host to several ongoing observing projects using
the onsite facilities. The observatory has two primary nighttime telescopes:
the 60-inch telescope, built in 1908 is home to the
HK Project and the Atmospheric Compensation Experiment; and the 100-inch
(Hooker) telescope, built in 1917, which is available to the
scientific community. Two solar observatories, the 60-foot tower telescope (operated
by USC), and the 150-foot tower telescope (operated by UCLA)
maintain long-term exploration of the magnetic activity behavior of the
Sun. There are also two interferometers onsite: the Infrared Spatial
Interferometer (ISI, operated by U.C. Berkeley), and the NRL Optical
Interferometer. The Telescopes in Education (TIE) Project operates a 24"
telescope, as well as the Snow Solar Telescope (built in
1904). Finally, a fully-robotic 32-inch Automatic Photoeletric Telescope (APT) is
operated by Tennessee State University.

The Multimission Archive at STScI is being developed to support
a variety of astronomical data archives, with the primary focus
on scientifically related data sets in the optical, ultraviolet, and
near-infrared parts of the spectrum.

The primary responsibility of the NSSDC is to further the
use of NASA spaceflight mission data. The NSSDC also provides
data from some ground-based and non-NASA sources which are considered
to be important adjuncts to the NASA space-based data. The
Data Center maintains and distributes documentation, indexes and catalogs about
the data in its archives, and similar information about important
space mission datasets maintained by other institutions. The
NSSDC's Astronomy and Astrophysics Home Page offers information about online
data and services, including access to a WAIS-searchable index of
more than 700 astronomical catalogs; high-level project descriptions for such
projects as ASCA, ROSAT, EUVE, HST, and COBE; and links
to many other popular astronomy and astrophysics resources.

Research tool providing access to a broad range of published
extragalactic data. NED is continuously being updated and augmented. It
is the systematic merger of major catalogs of extragalactic objects
covering all wavelengths, and of object lists appearing in the
refereed literature. NED contains about 800,000 objects, along with
names, redshifts, positions, bibliographic references, photometric measurements, and notes. The
Web interface of NED started recently serving images of objects
at various wavelengths.

The purpose of the NCSA Astronomy Digital Image Library is
to collect fully processed astronomical images in FITS format format
and make them available to the research community and the
general public via the World Wide Web. The collection contains
images from research observatories all over the world and taken
at all wavebands.

The mission of the National Solar Observatory is to advance
knowledge of the Sun, both as an astronomical object and
as the dominant external influence on Earth, by providing forefront
observational opportunities to the research community.

The Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer (NICMOS, Univ. of
Arizona) is a second-generation instrument to be installed on the
Hubble Space Telescope (HST) during the February 13, 1997 on-orbit
servicing mission. NICMOS will provide infrared imaging and spectroscopic observations
of astronomical targets between 0.8-2.5 microns.

A project of 100-m class optical and near-infrared telescope. Building
on the success of its 8-m Very Large Telescope (VLT)
and the coming to maturity of controlled optical systems, ESO
is undertaking the design of a giant, next generation optical
and near-infrared telescope, dubbed OWL for the eponymous bird's keen
night vision, and for OverWhelmingly Large. With a diameter of
100 meter, OWL will combine unrivalled light gathering power with
the ability to resolve details down to a milli-arc second.

The Imaging Node of the Planetary Data System is the
curator of NASA's primary digital image collections from past, present,
and future planetary missions. The node provides to the NASA
planetary science community the digital image archives, necessary ancillary datasets,
software tools, and technical expertise necessary to fully utilize the
vast collection of digital planetary imagery.

The Atlas is designed to be a single interface through
which you can search for, display, and download full resolution
data for all planetary missions. It will eventually replace individual
existing browsers. Until that time, links to the individual browsers
are provided from this central location. Current missions included in
the Atlas are: 2001 Mars Odyssey, Mars Global Surveyor, Magellan,
Clementine, Viking, Mars Pathfinder, Voyager, and Galileo.

Planck is the third Medium-Sized Mission (M3) of ESA's Horizon
2000 Scientific Programme. It is designed to image the anisotropies
of the Cosmic Background Radiation Field over the whole sky,
with unprecedented sensitivity and angular resolution. Planck will provide a
major source of information relevant to several cosmological and astrophysical
issues, such as testing theories of the early universe and
the origin of cosmic structure. Planck was formerly called
COBRAS/SAMBA. After the mission was selected and approved, it was
renamed in honor of the German scientist Max Planck (1858-1947),
Nobel Prize for Physics in 1918.

The PDS archives and distributes scientific data from NASA planetary
missions, astronomical observations, and laboratory measurements. The PDS is sponsored
by NASA's Office of Space Science. Its purpose is to
ensure the long-term usability of NASA data and to stimulate
advanced research. PDS is continually upgrading and updating its archives,
to better serve the needs of its user communities.

Includes software packages: RVSAO, an IRAF package for finding
radial velocities from spectra; RGSC a program for searching
the Hubble Space Telescope Guide Star Catalog; SKYMAP a
program for mapping star catalogs onto the sky; STAR
a program for searching star catalogs

The SOAR telescope is a Project for a 4.2-meter aperture
telescope funded by a partnership between the USA National Optical
Astronomy Observatories (NOAO), the Country of Brazil, Michigan State University,
and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The
project is fully funded and under construction atop Cerro Pachón
at the Cerro Tololo Interamerican Observatory (CTIO) in the Chilean
Andes. The telescope is being designed to support science in
both high quality imaging and spectroscopy in the optical and
near infrared wavelengths. The f/16 Ritchey-Chrétien optical design shall deliver
a 12-arcmin diameter field of view with a tip/tilt stabilized
image through a telescope with 0.18 arcsec image quality. SOAR
should begin science operations in 2004.

Subaru is an 8.2 m Japan national optical-infrared telescope at
the summit of Mauna Kea, Hawaii, operated by the National
Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ), National Institutes of Natural Sciences.
The site includes astrophotographs from Subaru.

The SDAC at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center serves current
solar ground- and spaced-based imagery, text, figures, maps, and tables
of NASA eclipse bulletins, solar flare data from the Compton
GRO BATSE experiment and the Yohkoh spacecraft, and science operations
planning information for the SOHO Science Working Team.... and more
to come.

Solar-Terrestrial Physics Division of the National Geophysical Data Center home
page. Includes several various STP disciplines within the Center: geomagnetism, Iononosphere, Solar and Upper
Atmosphere, and two satellite programs: GOES and DMSP.
DMSP is a two satellite constellation of near-polar orbiting, sun-synchronous
satellites monitoring meteorological, oceanographic and solar-terrestrial physics environments. NGDC maintains
an archive of all data recorded on DMSP satellites as
relayed to NGDC by Air Force Global Weather Central. Data
from March 1992 to March 1994, are considered to be
experimental. After March 1994, the system should be fully operational.

The South African Astronomical Observatory (SAAO) is the National Facility
for optical/infrared astronomy in South Africa. Its prime function is
to further fundamental research in astronomy and astrophysics at a
national and international level through the provision and use of
a world-class astronomical facility.

The ST-ECF was established in 1984 jointly by the European
Space Agency and the European Southern Observatory and is located
at the ESO headquarters at Garching near Munich. The ST-ECF
supports the European astromical community in exploiting the research opportunities
provided by the earth-orbiting Hubble Space Telescope. The ST-ECF provides
detailed technical information about the HST and its science instruments,
supports European astronomers in the preparation of HST observing proposals,
coordinates the development of computer software tuned to the specific
data analysis needs of HST users, operates and maintains an
archive of all the scientific data collected by HST, and
acts as a European centre for associated meetings and workshops.
In all of these duties the ST-ECF staff maintains close
contacts with the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore,
which is charged with the scientific operation of the HST
observatory. HST Archive at CADC.

The Spitzer Space Telescope, formerly known as Space InfraRed Telescope
Facility (SIRTF) is the fourth and final element in NASA's
family of "Great Observatories". It consists of a 0.85-meter telescope
and three cryogenically-cooled science instruments capable of performing imaging and
spectroscopy in the 3 - 180 micron wavelength range. Incorporating
the latest in large-format infrared detector arrays, Spitzer offers orders-of-magnitude
improvements in capability over existing programs. While Spitzer's mission lifetime
requirement remains 2.5 years, recent programmatic and engineering developments have
brought a 5-year cryogenic mission within reach. Spitzer represents an
important scientific and technical bridge to NASA's new Origins program.

Site with links to Standard Object Resources classified according to
observing techniques and wavelength domains. Created by Patrice Corporon; now
maintained by Shashikiran Ganesh and Anatoly Miroshnichenko. (Indian mirror;
US mirror)

The Stratospheric Observatory For Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) will be a
2.5 meter, optical/infrared/sub-millimeter telescope mounted in a Boeing 747, to
be used for many basic astronomical observations performed at stratospheric
altitudes. The Facility will accommodate installation of different focal plane
instruments, with in-flight accessibility, provided by investigators selected from the
international science community. The Facility objective is to have an
operational lifetime in excess of 20 years.

Data Archive from the NASA Submillimeter Wave Astronomy Satellite, a
pathfinding mission for studying the chemical composition of interstellar galactic
clouds to help determine the process of star formation. Launched
on December 5, 1998, it has made detailed 1 degree x 1 degree maps
of many giant molecular and dark cloud cores during the
first 4 years of the mission. SWAS makes new data
public every six months, with the final release due in
September, 2004. CfA SWAS pages.

This Web page provides a simple interactive tool for line
identification in B stars along the main sequence. The calculation
makes use of the atomic line list of Kurucz &amp
Bell (1995). For one of six possible effective temperatures between
10000 and 35000 K and an arbitrary wavelength range between
3000 and 10000 Å a normalized synthetic spectrum is displayed
on-line. The output consists of a gif image (~10 kB)
or a gzipped postscript file (~30 kB).

The Terrestrial Planet Finder (TPF) is a key element of
NASA Origins Program. It will study all aspects of planets:
from their formation and development in disks of dust and
gas around newly forming stars to the presence and features
of those planets orbiting the nearest stars; from the numbers
at various sizes, and places to their suitability as an
abode for life. By combining the high sensitivity of space
telescopes with the sharply detailed pictures from an interferometer, TPF
will be able to reduce the glare of parent stars
by a factor of more than one hundred-thousand to see
planetary systems as far away as 50 light years.

This online version of the Minnesota Automated Plate Scanner (MAPS)
Catalog of the Palomar Observatory Sky Survey (Epoch I) [hereafter
the MAPS Catalog] was constructed by Juan Cabanela, one of
the authors of the original MAPS Catalog of the POSS
I. The MAPS Catalog was originally distributed on four DVDs
to several astronomical data centers. The goal of this project
is to make the catalog available in an interactive format.
This site should be viewed as a backup/alternate version of
the website maintained by the Minnesota Automated Plate Scanner group
at http://aps.umn.edu/.

UKIRT is the world's largest telescope dedicated solely to infrared
astronomy. It is sited in Hawaii near the summit of
Mauna Kea at an altitude of 4194m above sea level.
It is owned by the United Kingdom Particle Physics and
Astronomy Research Council and operated, along with the James Clerk
Maxwell Telescope (JCMT), by the staff of the Joint Astronomy
Centre, which is located in Hilo. The operation and development
of UKIRT are overseen by the UKIRT Board.

The VIRMOS project aims to deliver 2 spectrographs for the
ESO- VLT . VIMOS is a visible imaging spectrograph with
outstanding multiplex capabilities, allowing to take spectra of more than
800 objects simultaneously (10 arcsec slits), or spectroscopy of all
objects in a 1x1 arcmin2 area. NIRMOS is a near-infrared
imaging spectrograph with a multiplex of 180 (10 arcsec slits),
and allows spectroscopy of all objects in a 30x30 arcsec2
area. Together VIMOS and NIRMOS allow to get spectroscopy from
0.37 to 1.8 microns, with unsurpassed efficiency for large surveys.

The Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI) consists in the coherent
combination of the four VLT Unit Telescopes and of several
moveable 1.8m Auxiliary Telescopes. Once fully operational, the VLTI will
provide both a high sensitivity as well as milli-arcsec angular
resolution provided by baselines of up to 200m length.

VISTA is the Visible and Infrared Telescope for Astronomy: a
4-m Wide Field Survey telescope for the Southern Hemisphere, being
built at Cerro Paranal, close to ESO VLT, by a
consortium of 18 UK universities.

In 1986, astronomers from the University of Texas established a
world--wide network of cooperating astronomical observatories to obtain uninterrupted time--series
measurements of variable stars. The technological goal was to resolve
the multi-periodic oscillations observed in these objects into their individual
components; the scientific goal was to construct accurate theoretical models
of the target objects, constrained by their observed behavior, from
which their fundamental astrophysical parameters could be derived. This approach
has been extremely successful, and has placed the fledgling science
of stellar seismology at the forefront of stellar astrophysics.

WFCAM is an IR wide field camera for the UK
Infrared Telescope on Mauna Kea. WFCAM will be operational as
an IR imaging survey instrument in late 2002. The camera
has been designed to maximize survey speed at J, H
and K while retaining excellent image quality.

This is the website for NASA's Wide Field Infrared Explorer
(WIRE). The primary purpose of WIRE was a four month
infrared survey of the universe, focusing specifically on starburst galaxies
and luminous protogalaxies. On 29 Mar 1999, the WIRE
mission has been declared a loss.